In the immediate aftermath of Trumps electoral victory I saw a number of left individuals in Ireland come close to welcoming the result because they saw it as a blow to feminist and other anti-oppression movements that they think ‘divide the left’. Essentially they embraced the talking points that in essence said that women, trans people and people of colour had become too demanding, had gone too far and that this had resulted in a ‘white working class’ backlash bringing Trump to power.
In the immediate aftermath of Trumps electoral victory I saw a number of left individuals in Ireland come close to welcoming the result because they saw it as a blow to feminist and other anti-oppression movements that they think ‘divide the left’. Essentially they embraced the talking points that in essence said that women, trans people and people of colour had become too demanding, had gone too far and that this had resulted in a ‘white working class’ backlash bringing Trump to power.
My long read on the election results demonstrates that this rather gross thesis is wrong as it misunderstands the broader attitudes of those who voted for Trump. It’s also wrong in the way it assigns ‘blame’ . It may well be that part of the source of alt-right recruitment are the sort of men who are bitter because they think their inability to get a girlfriend is down to the fact that women have more economic independence than used to be the case. Some of them are daft enough to say this in public, recently blogger Stefan Molyneux whinged “Was there such a thing as the friend zone before the existence of social welfare.” But its economic independence allowing for free choice of who to form relationships with that is the problem here!
This blog captures my side of the discussion on a now deleted Facebook profile with a number of people on the left who to some extent had welcomed the Trump result as a lesson to feminists and who were pouring scorn on the Women Marchs. Because this was a FB comment conversation which no one really expects to be long lasting I’ve removed full names as well as editing for readability, tangent removal & clarity when I republish my side of that conversation below.
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This thread is very alt-right meets Nostalgic Left – the red / brown alliance first time as tragedy second time as farce. For those who don’t know the red-brown alliance is a term used to describe a number of moments where marxist leninist parties have formed alliances with the far right, most infamously with the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact where Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union agreed to invade and divide Poland.
I was actually making a relatively flippant observation when I posted about a convergence I’ve seen between the way the alt-right talks and the Nostalgic left. The ‘second time as farce’ is a clue that it isn’t actually the Ribentrop-Molotov pact but something a lot more, well farcical.
The need for me to prove any such similarity has been removed since by ‘ED’s comment that ‘Trump had my vote”. I think it’s quite telling that no one who challenged me has felt the need to even acknowledge that never mind question it. Elsewhere above we have ‘I’ with a ‘Soros would be proud’ although at least this time out he hasn’t posted about pizzagate being a thing. Again unchallenged.
Or B’s targeting of the demand for ‘trans bathrooms’ as a problem – something that only became a major issue in the US election because the republicans decided attacking trans people was a useful wedge issue in the same way B. deploys it above. Unchallenged. These are all people on the left using the tropes of the far-right because they share a common hostility to anti-oppression politics.
GP is completely wrong on the composition of the Trump vote including a significant number of working class whites who are otherwise progressive. As with Brexit the exit polls allow us to have a good idea of how Trump voters felt on other issues and from that it’s clear that most of his working class vote was racist, favouring deportations of all paperless migrants and the building of the wall. I’ve written on this at length ( http://anarchism.pageabode.com/andrewnflood/trump-myth-progressive-misled-white-working-class ) but the bottom line is that there are more workers threatened with deportation than otherwise progressive working class Trump voters. The insistence the left has to focus its energy on Trump voters is a post-fact assertion whose only value is the political agenda it carries. It would be a nonsensical strategy to actually try and implement as there are not very many of them and they are pretty scattered.
The thread is informative in other ways. I wonder for instance if anyone has taken a look at the gender breakdown of who clicked like on the original post appearing to welcome Trumps election as a blow to anti-oppression politics? It’s higher than 95% men which I think should speak to those of you whom think the way to rebuild the left is to sideline the issues that saw over 1% of the US population take to the streets Saturday in the Women’s March. The strategy should be to push these people to the left rather than reaching out to Trump voters. In any case the tiny number of working class Trump voters who can be won over are far more likely to move to an actual fighting movement of the sort Angela Davis described from the platform of the Women’s march (https://youtu.be/TTB-m2NxWzA ) then to some weak assed lets ignore racism & transphobia in the name of ‘unity’ nostalgic left schlock.
The assertion that “the mass of Trump voters who are neither racists nor committed right-wingers” as I said is simply wrong. We have empirical evidence on this and it shows for instance that 47 million of Trumps 55 million voters want a wall built along the Mexican border.
From a radical left perspective there is a huge amount of motherhood and apple pie in NFs piece but on the key area of difference her strategy is not only wrong its nonsensical. What appears to have happened is a hostility to the progressive neoliberal Democratic Party which I obviously sympathise with turned into a massive over estimation and generalisation of what was a small but key rust belt revolt that gave Trump the election in terms of the electoral college but not the popular vote. I think this misreading which inverts reality is also the result of the set of ideological blinkers I’ve taken to calling the Nostalgic Left. I deliberately went for a shorthand that was descriptive in a fairly soft way, others use much harsher terms.
Trump voters were not the blue collar working class. That section was more likely to vote Clinton or very much more likely to stay at home. Clinton’s awfulness lost her the election all right. His voters were disproportionally rich, white, male, rural and old. And massively racist as measured in the exit poll questions on ‘the wall’, Black Lives Matter and deport everyone. A left strategy that chooses to centre that section of the population that is disproportionally rich, white, male, rural and old and which also holds racist views is a nonsensical strategy, no matter how much experience the person putting it forward has. Even in practical terms its a section of the population thats harder to reach and because of age likely to be much more set in its views.
If I was to advocate a single strategy it would start with the 1% of the population who turned out to protest and with Angela Davis’s call from the speakers platform for an “inclusive and intersectional feminism that calls upon all of us to join the resistance to racism, to Islamophobia, to anti-Semitism, to misogyny, to capitalist exploitation.
"Yes, we salute the fight for 15. We dedicate ourselves to collective resistance. Resistance to the billionaire mortgage profiteers and gentrifiers. Resistance to the health care privateers. Resistance to the attacks on Muslims and on immigrants. Resistance to attacks on disabled people. Resistance to state violence perpetrated by the police and through the prison industrial complex. Resistance to institutional and intimate gender violence, especially against trans women of color.”
Not because such a movement is perfect (follow the internal debates and you quickly see both the problems and the fight to address them – that fight is already happening though). But because its composed of people who are already acting and whose only constitutional option is to accept four years of a republican government that in its first 24 hours shredded a load of hard won rights. Clearly the progressive neo-liberal’s that Fraser correctly rails against will seek to limit that movement to a constitutional ‘Michelle 2020’ but while that might work in 2019 its a lot harder for them to hold that line at the start of 2017.
The racist Citizenship referendum in Ireland is quite a good illustration of why Fraser was wrong not to actually look at the numbers and why you are wrong to mistake my argument as one based on moral outrage rather than the balance of forces. My own experience in that referendum of going door to door where I live (I’d just moved in back then) was terrible.
About 20% of people in the US voted for Trump. Those people were richer, whiter, maler, older, more rural and way way more racist than the rest of the population. They are also a small minority.
In the racist referendum almost 80% voted yes on a turnout that was close to 60%. A quick bit of maths says thats 48% of the registered voters (so maybe 44% of the population). Not a tiny minority.
If you look at Trumps mobilising messages ‘build the wall’, ‘deport all paperless migrants’’ ‘make America great again’ they were designed to mobilise racist voters (and Clinton tried and mostly failed to do the reverse). What’s more information has begun to emerge about the micro-targeting Facebook campaign that probably won him the election by winning the swing states and it seems very clear that this campaign (ran by the same company that ran Farage’s Brexit) used racist micro targeting to further mobilise the racist vote and demobilise the black vote. All this and the exit poll data suggest Trump’s vote is very substantially a concentration of racists in the US.
‘This side of the revolution’ I suspect its going to be hard to win over 100% of the working class never mind 100% of the population. Indeed its something of an irony that the section of the left that loves shouting about ‘gulaging people’ crosses over so strongly with the section that wants to prioritise listening to concerns of Trump voters.
Maybe its all a way of drawing up a list for that gulag.